Many types infusion brewers are commonly used nowadays and can typically brew coffee or other brewable beverages such as tea or the like and are often referred to as ‘coffee machines’ or ‘coffee brewers’ independently of the type of beverage they are actually used to brew. Filter-based coffee machines use a filter to separate coffee grinds from the coffee-infused water. In many filter-based coffee machines, a given amount of water is infused with a given amount of coffee until the infused water seeps through the filter under the action of gravity. In household filter-based coffee machines, it is known to discard the filter manually after the brewing process is completed, or washing the filter by hand in the case of re-usable filters.
Some more elaborated automated filter coffee machines allow users to brew many portions of coffee prior to manual intervention, and are well adapted to applications serving multiple users. An example of this is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 7,858,135 to applicant. In this particular case, the brewer uses a vacuum to assist gravity in bringing the infused water across the filter, and uses a roll of filter paper which is progressively unrolled to present fresh paper to subsequent brewing steps. More specifically, an upper chamber is provided for receiving particulate steeping material (coffee, tea, or other) and hot liquid water, a lower chamber for providing a vacuum, with the filter path extending therebetween. During operation, the lower chamber can draw the infusion from the upper chamber across the filter and thus produce coffee which can be conveyed to a suitable vessel. Once a given amount of coffee is produced, the upper chamber can be raised away from the lower chamber, and the strip of filter material from the roll can be pulled to unroll fresh filter material. The used coffee grinds which lay on top of the used portion of the filter are moved with the filter strip and fall into a waste container which needs to be emptied after a while. It will be understood that the amount of portions of coffee which are brewable between manual interventions when using such a machine, though greater than with household single-use filters, is nonetheless limited by the size of the filter paper rolls and of the size of the coffee grind waste container.
Although known coffee brewers were satisfactory to a certain degree, there remained room for improvement. For instance, it was sought to still further address the frequency of human maintenance intervention or other aspects pertaining generally to maintenance.